Jackie Bird's hunt for lost boy next door

Feature writer

Sunday 8 July 2012

To Jackie Bird, Danny McCafferty is the boy who died – the 19-year-old neighbour who went to Korea and never returned.

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By Mark Smith

Like hundreds of other Scots who were killed in the Korean War, his life disappeared from history. McCafferty's story intrigued Bird, and tomorrow night the BBC presenter will front a new documentary about her two-year investigation into the life and death of the mysterious boy next door.

Bird first found out about McCafferty when she came up with idea of a film about Scotland's contribution to the Korean War between 1950 and 1953."I grew up in Hamilton with Mrs McCafferty being the old lady who lived next door," says Bird. "When I started researching the Korean War, my dad dropped a bombshell and told me her son Danny had died in Korea."Dad remembers him as a trendy young guy growing up in the 1940s. He was always laughing, always joking, and I said that I had had no idea, as it had never been mentioned."Bird decided to try to find out what happened to McCafferty as a way of exploring why the Korean War has been largely forgotten. "I started to put flesh on the bones," she says. "Little things. Danny wanted to be a driver. He liked snooker. He loved dancing. And the fact that his background was almost a mirror image of mine was also interesting. He would have grown up where I grew up. Maybe I would have played with his children, maybe I would have been friends with them."What Bird discovered was that McCafferty, who would be 80 years old had he lived, served as a gunner in the trenches of Korea and died when a shell exploded near his position. In the programme, Stan Strudwick, a friend of McCafferty's whom Bird tracked down, describes what happened."I heard the boom and I knew we had about three or four seconds, so I said 'run for it'," he says. "Danny was running the same as me but the shell came down more or less three or four yards from him and hit him."The doctors tried to save Danny but couldn't stop the bleeding. "He looked at me and knew," says Strudwick. "I could see the life literally draining out of him."In one of the most moving parts of the documentary, Bird tracks down McCafferty's grave at the national cemetery in South Korea and leaves a picture of him and his mum, Mary, on the headstone."It was so stark and so sad," she says, "and what hit me wasn't the fact that it was a soldier's grave. It was the fact that no-one from this huge family, no-one who loved him, no-one who knew him, had ever paid tribute, ever knelt at his grave. I felt good at reuniting Danny and his mum."Bird wanted to raise the profile of the Korean War but also use McCafferty as a representative of the 1090 Scots who died in Korea and explore why their experiences have slipped from popular imagination.She believes part of the reason is the fact that the Korean War took place just after the Second World War and before the mass media that covered Vietnam. But what worries her more is that wars we are fighting now – in particular Afghanistan – could be forgotten in the same way."I think there are parallels with wars fought on foreign soil, often at the behest of other countries, that are perhaps seen as unpopular," she says. "I worry about the ingloriousness of the end of the Korean War, when there was no definitive victory, and the parallels with Iraq and perhaps more so Afghanistan when we back away quietly and let them get on with it."I wonder how venerated our servicemen and women will be 60 years down the line when some revisionism has taken place and we're saying: you know what, we really shouldn't have been there."Scotland's Forgotten War, Monday, BBC One, 10.35pm

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Jackie Bird's hunt for lost boy next door

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